Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studying the mechanisms and trajectories of child development continues to be of critical importance, especially in thecontext of fast-changing digital environments, ubiquitous screens, and ever-increasing permeations of technology intoour lives. In this work, we study historical changes in the visual complexity of information presented in different mediacategories, including an eighty-year history of Disney movies and a forty-six-year history of NBC news programs andtelevision commercials. Our analyses include metrics of static visual variance in single frames as well as several metricsof visual change over time. By performing similar analyses on a dataset of egocentric videos, we compare trends in digitalmedia with data that more closely resemble real-life visual experiences. Understanding the visual characteristics of themedia we consume is an important step towards further investigating the effects that these characteristics might have onour perception, attention, and learning, especially in young children.